﻿The Day the Call Came (1964)﻿Thomas HindeWith a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell

Book Description

The hero of Thomas Hinde's classic of paranoia is Harry Bale, a married father of two with a house in the suburbs and a penchant for gardening. Affable and mild-mannered, he is to all outward appearance perfectly ordinary. No one-not even his wife-knows what he is really up to. Harry is awaiting a call from his superiors on the radio transmitter hidden beneath the attic floorboards. There are signs the call will come soon: he has begun to receive sinister messages by letter and telephone, and he thinks he has uncovered a monstrous conspiracy involving his neighbours. But when one day the call finally does come and Harry receives his deadly assignment, nothing will ever be the same again. . . .

Frightening in its implications and darkly humorous in its execution, Thomas Hinde's thriller The Day the Call Came (1964) earned rave reviews on its initial appearance but has been long out of print. This edition features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell and the original jacket art by Victor Reinganum.

reviews

‘It would be hard to imagine a novel more quietly terrifying than this sunlit nightmare of a book.’ – Robert Baldick, Daily Telegraph

‘[A]s profound as anything put out by names like Graham Greene, Patrick White and the rest. This establishes Thomas Hinde as one of our finest and most individual novelists. A superb book – deep, rapid, thrilling, disturbing.’ - Anthony Burgess

'The cleverest book I have read this year . . . a macabre high comedy by an author whose lynx-eyed social observation is matched by his power to bring forth nightmares in broad daylight.' - Irving Wardle, The Observer

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Thomas Hinde is the pen-name of Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, who was born in 1926 in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a boys’ school headmaster. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he read Modern History, and began writing his first novel while serving as a teacher to a farmer’s two children. He worked as a civil servant and later as an executive of the Shell Company before becoming a full-time writer in 1960.

His first novel, Mr. Nicholas, appeared in 1952 to great critical acclaim. The influential critic Kenneth Allsop called it ‘one of the few really distinguished post-war novels’, and it was widely praised in both England and America. Other successes followed and secured Hinde’s reputation as one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation; some of the best are Ninety Double Martinis (1963), The Day the Call Came (1964), and Games of Chance (1965), the latter comprising two novellas, ‘The Interviewer’ and ‘The Investigator’. High (1968), a novel set on a college campus, drew on Hinde’s experiences teaching at the University of Illinois from 1965 to 1967. Four further novels appeared in the 1970s, followed by Daymare in 1980, and, after a twenty-six-year gap, In Time of Plague (2006). Hinde has also published more than a dozen nonfiction books, including biographies, history, and travel books, sometimes written with his wife, Susan Chitty. He passed away in 2014.

"We owe a debt of gratitude to the publisher Valancourt, whose aim is to resurrect some neglected works of literature, especially those incorporating a supernatural strand, and make them available to a new readership." - Times Literary Supplement